Knowing what people think and remember is a very complex task. As with other sciences and disciplines that study the human being, Market Research does everything in its power to ensure that its findings are objective and as close as possible to reality. Human memory is a topic that involves many variables that can often overwhelm even the most experienced researchers.
Our remembrance can be affected by many factors. It is known that our memories can be modified over time and that they can include biases based on our life history. Likewise, we tend to be very selective with our memories. If this didn’t already sound very complex, we have the existence of déjà vu that put the fine line between reality and imagination on the desktop.
As a general rule in Market Research we have two main types of remembrance. The first of these is spontaneous remembrance. When a person can answer us about a particular topic with a simple verbal reference, we are facing this type of memory. When we find these cases, we can hypothesize that what is remembered is very important for the respondent, since it is a topic of complete interest to them or it is something that everyone talks about.
On the contrary, if it is necessary to use multimedia stimuli to help the person under analysis to remember a certain campaign or idea, we are talking about assisted remembrance. When we find this type of memory, it is possible to assume that the person who remembers is not clear about the message or confuses it with others that are very similar. We can also infer that what requires support to be remembered has been seen very sporadically, which makes it difficult to store it in our mind.
Depending on the objectives of our research, due precautions must be taken to delve into both remembrances. Among the most common best practices is to always prioritize spontaneous remembrance questions over assisted remembrance questions. Otherwise, the opportunity to find out with certainty if a person is capable of recovering from memory what we want to deepen without any type of support is lost.
In any case, remembrance studies allow us to find out elements such as the effectiveness of the message in a campaign, assess what resources of a message are better remembered and what is the market’s reading of a communication. It is surprising when, on more than one occasion, the results strongly oppose what was originally proposed in the design phase of a message under investigation.
Do you need to carry out a remembrance study? At Acertiva we have almost 20 years of experience knowing the Latin American consumer. Write us today so you can tell us about your needs and we will tell you how we can be your allies in LATAM.
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